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This week’s Photo Friday challenge is gray. The easy way out would be a grayscale image, but I like this one which I took from the parking lot of Fluor’s San Francisco offices overlooking Oyster Bay. The photo is unretouched.

It’s Memorial Day weekend here in the USA. Which mean a long weekend and a chance to go to the beach, lie by the pool, drink your favorite cold beverage… or work on your websites (as I am).

Still, you might find yourself looking for a distraction. If you’re a Flickr fan, look no further than BigHugeLabs’ Name that Contact. It’s only really fun if you’ve got at least a couple dozen contacts, but if you do, it’s extremely addictive and entertaining.

You’ve been warned.

This week’s Photo Friday Challenge is Futuristic.

I took this photo at Terminal 3 of the Madrid Airport last November.

I first participated in the “a day in the life of…” group on Flickr two years ago. It was a great experience, and the created some fun posters — part collaborative art; part social networking experiment. Now Flickr has officially sponsored their own similar group.

24 Hours of Flickr will hold their own DILO-type event this coming May 5th. Anyone can join, and by posting your photos (which must be taken on May 5, 2007), you implicitly agree to having it published in a special 24 Hours of Flickr book that’s been planned.

Of course, it’s great fun, but especially if you join in. Grab your camera, join the group, and get ready to post some pictures from your day.

Read more from the Flickr blog.

This weeks Photo Friday theme is Heat. Thinking about it, there were a lot of possibilities. I could’ve chosen a clever play on words and gone with a Flaming Lips concert photo, or a fire road where I mountain bike. Or I could play it straight, with a photo of a forest fire in the Sierras.

In the end, I went somewhere in the middle ground, with this image called Ring of Fire.

See if you can guess what it is before clicking through to find out.

This week’s Photo Friday theme is addiction. This photo covers a couple of mine. How many can you find?

A while back I promised I’d be updating the site header each month. I’m not really following a theme, though so far I’ve been using photos I’ve taken.

This month, you get a panorama I stitched from a series of photos I took in Las Vegas a couple weeks ago at the Ghost Bar. It’s located on the 53rd floor of The Palms hotel, and it’s definitely a great place to go to drink in the view (and a martini or two).

No, they haven’t gotten their holidays mixed up, but there is a secret Easter egg sprung over at Flickr. Add a note to a photo with the text “ho ho ho hat” and you can add a Santa hat to the photo. Add a note with “ho ho ho beard” to add a nice, fluffy Santa beard.

Mess with your friends photos (you’re not really changing the photo) — it’s fun! Here are just a few examples.

A little something extra in the eggnog for A Whole Lotta Nothing for sharing this tip!

Most mobile phones these days come with a basic camera built-in. It’s handy for spur-of-the-moment snapshots. I’ve used it in stores to capture price and SKU info for further research, or to document that fender-bender in the parking lot.

What’s not convenient is a way to share those photos online. Sure, a lot of the mobile companies have services, but if you’re already using something like Flickr, you don’t want or need another online gallery.

A number of companies have created add-ons that allow uploads from your mobile to Flickr, including Shozu, Nokia and Yahoo’s own Zonetag. But none of these would work with my HP iPAQ hw6515.

Enter Nakama.  This free service allows you to upload photos from any mobile phone capable of sending picture messages. While Nakama does provide it’s own online gallery, the real strength is it’s ability to automatically publish uploaded photos to your Flickr, MySpace or Live Space account.

I’ve tested Nakama,  and it worked perfectly. No special software was required, just the ability to send picture messages from my phone.

One caveat — the gallery of popular photos on Nakama contains a lot of suggestive photos. They do provide a “flag as inappropriate” capability, but so far, the majority of visitors apparently approve. Personally, I don’t give a rip about their own gallery; I’m only interested in using the service to make it easy to post to Flickr. And that it does quite well.

My friends know that I love Flickr. Even though I could create and host my own photo blog, I find Flickr engaging, fascinating, and a wonderful place for exploration. Flickr of course was one of the first Web 2.0 sites to popularize the concept of folksonomy tagging. The social strengths of Flickr with it’s contacts, friends and family model, the commenting capabilities, and user-created groups open Flickr up for inventive uses.

Of course Flickr has always been super-useful for collecting photos from events (like UXWEEK), but I ran across another innovative example today on the Drupal website. The Drupal team asked users to upload screen shots, then annotate them with notes. (As you move your cursor over the images, you’ll see the user notes). Yet another cool example of leveraging simple, readily available and free technology and integrating it within a work process. Nice.

Of course, most people are more interested in just pure fun. I’ve had my share of that. Two of the groups that I’ve been involved in on Flickr that were pure fun were the DILO (Day in the Life Of) and Squared Circle groups, both of which ended up producing posters in a sort of collaborative art experiment — immortalizing some really bad photographs of mine. Still, they remain a great way to have fun with Flickr.

Want more Flickr fun? The very best website for fun Flickr goodies is Flagrant Disregard’s Flickr Toys. They’ve got tons of little goodies to do things like make your own calendars, motivational posters, fake magazine covers and baseball cards, to useful tools like the profile gadget shown at the left.

You’ve got a digital camera. Get a Flickr account. Play with some toys. Be inventive. And have fun!